The Nuclear Option” and the One Party State
by Paul Street
www.dissidentvoice.org
April 26, 2005

America’s
wacky right wing party and political system doesn’t get much worse than
this. On Sunday, the Republican United States Senate Majority Leader Bill
Frist (R-Tennessee) appeared on a national evangelical Christian television
show that depicted Democrats as being against religious believers. Frist’s
remarks appeared as part of a “Justice Sunday” telecast titled “The
Filibuster Against People of Faith.” “Justice Sunday” is set up by the
Family Research Council, a Washington-D.C.-based right wing lobbying group
that is helping lead a reactionary “Christian” campaign to impose right-wing
political dominance over the federal judiciary. The Sunday broadcast
denounced the Democrats for using the 200-year old Senate filibuster
procedure to block the appointment to federal judicial positions of nominees
who oppose abortion rights as a matter of moral and religious principle.

It’s a bit of an odd
role for Frist, who has not been as strongly associated with the Christian
rights as his more messianic fellow Republican leaders House Majority Whip
Tom Delay (R-Texas) and President George W. Bush (R-Texas). “With his
patrician bearing and background in the relatively liberal Presbyterian
Church,” the New York Times noted last Friday, “Dr, Frist, a
Harvard-trained transplant surgeon, does not fit in as naturally with
Christian conservatives as President Bush.”

Under the filibuster,
designed to protect the rights of minority parties in the Senate, it
requires the vote of 60 of the nation’s Senators, not just a simple majority
(51), to approve the appointment of a federal judge. The Republicans
currently possess 55 Senate seats and thus lack the necessary votes to cut
off a filibuster. Since the nation’s Christian Fundamentalist President
seized power with Supreme Court assistance in January of 2000, he has made
215 judicial nominations, of which just 10 have failed to win confirmation
because of Democratic filibusters.

In what they have
termed “the nuclear option,” the Republicans are planning to make a historic
change in the Senate’s rules by eliminating the filibuster for judicial
appointments. The Republican Party, which used the filibuster to block
Democratic appointments and legislation when it was the minority Senate
party (preventing Lyndon Johnson's nomination of Abe Fortas for the Chief
Justice seat at the Supreme Court in
1968, for example), now calls the longstanding parliamentary technique
“unfair” and “discriminatory”.

According to a recent
public opinion poll conducted for NBC News and the Wall Street Journal,
50 percent of the American populace thinks the Senate should keep the
filibuster. Forty percent think the filibuster should be dropped and 10
percent are undecided.

A showdown is expected in the next few weeks
over Bush’s re-nomination of the previously defeated federal appellate court
candidates Priscilla Owen and Janice Rogers Brown. Owen is an extreme right
member of the Republican-appointed Texas Supreme Court. When first put up by
Bush in 2002, she was opposed by 19 Texas civil rights, labor, women’s
rights, consumer and other organizations who noted that her rulings “favored
the interests of corporate Texas or government at the expense of ordinary
Texans.” Owen’s opinions reveal a hard right worldview that opposes
government protection for all but possessors of propertied wealth and
political power.

Brown is an activist,
extreme right member of the California Supreme Court. According to a recent
article in the New York Times Magazine by Jeffrey Rosen, a law
professor at George Washington University, she is “known for her vigorous
criticism of the post-New Deal regulatory state.” Brown once referred to
“1937” as “the year the Supreme Court began to uphold the New Deal” and “the
triumph of our socialist revolution.” Rosen noted that Brown “has praised
the court’s invalidation of maximum-hour and minimum-wage laws in the
Progressive era,” reflecting her extreme support for the protection of
concentrated property rights at the expense of basic human rights.

Beneath their
opposition to abortion rights and support for other key parts of the
Christian right’s red meat “moral issues” agenda, Owen and Brown are
champions of the anti-regulatory neoliberal political-economic agenda that
most interests the Republican’s corporate-plutocratic funding base.

Last
Thursday, The Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee approved and
sent Owen and Brown to the full Senate for the second time. The fight over
their re-nominations, expected to occur sometime in the next few weeks,
could trigger a critical confrontation, with the Republicans voting (by
simple majority) to abolish the filibuster in judicial nomination. The
Democrats, in turn, are threatening to slow the Senate “to a snail’s pace”
by insisting that the body follow all of its formal procedures to the
smallest letter.

What’s going on here?
Frist’s television appearance clearly reflects his strong presidential
ambitions and the related calculation that the Republican path to the White
Houses goes through the religious right. According to the Times,
Frist must “court the evangelical Protestant groups and other religious
traditionalists that formed the bedrock of President Bush’s winning
coalition” if he wants to follow Bush into the presidency. (NYT,
April 22, 2005) And judicial appointments are a very big deal for the
religious right, which includes a number of Congressmen (including some
Senators) and perhaps the President himself. Much of fundamentalist America
is convinced that “liberal” judicial “activists” in the state and federal
courts are stealing their personal and property rights, threatening their
“way of life,” and enforcing an elite, “un-American,” and immoral
secular-humanist world view on virtuous God-fearing Christian majority.

The Republicans are
clearly trying to prepare the way for the successful appointment of hard
right justices to the Supreme Court, which has disappointed both the White
House and the religious right with its failure to abolish affirmative action
in higher education and its reluctance to decide in favor of the some of the
federal government’s most draconian, anti-civil-libertarian post-9/11
“national security” actions. The high court has opposed some lovely little
hard right initiatives like the attempt to legalize the execution of minors.

The impending likely “nuclear” crisis comes as
Bush expects to appoint at least two Supreme Court justices, leaving a dark
reactionary stain on the nation’s legal history for many years to come. It
comes also at a time when Republicans have some reason to believe that they
have attained single-party dominance in the Senate as well as across the
rest of the Congress, the White House, and much of the federal judiciary for
quite some time. Despite the existence of an American electorate that is as
divided as ever in party identification and tends towards liberalism and
even a measure of social democracy and anti-imperialism on many issues, a
number of factors have come together to produce Republican hegemony across
the three branches of the federal government. These factors include the
right-leaning bias of the nation’s highly concentrated dominant (corporate)
media (falsely termed “mainstream”), the “safe-seat” gerrymandering
(redistricting) of the US House of Representatives (which makes a formerly
small party gap of 25 seats practically insurmountable), the strong
identification between national security and the Republican Executive Branch
in the post-9/11 era, the strong political mobilization and organizational
capacities of the Christian right, and presence of corporate political money
to favor the more openly pro-business Republican Party in “America, the Best
Democracy Money Can Buy,” where ruling judicial doctrine equates political
cash with free speech.

Another factor that
deserves mention, of course, is the deep complicity of the Democrats in the
corporate and imperial takeover of American politics -- something that costs
it the possibility of offering a relevant popular alternative to the
in-power right. The increasingly token “opposition party’s” abject failure
to fight the great interrelated struggles for social justice, civil rights
and global peace is significantly self-imposed. It was glaringly evident in
the tepid Kerry campaign, which embraced the unpopular US occupation of Iraq
and refused to talk about rising American poverty and the related
hyper-concentration of wealth and income in the US, the industrialized
world’s most unequal and wealth-top-heavy nation by far. It is seen in many
Democrats’ support for the recent regressive Republican bankruptcy bill (an
assault on the nation’s millions of working poor) and their refusal to
demand even basic conditions for approving the White House’s obscene
allotment of $81 billion more to the illegal campaign in Iraq.

Given these and other
factors that may be relegating the Democrats to permanently marginal status,
many Republicans have a difficult time imagining themselves on the wrong end
of the filibuster in the future. You don’t engage the “nuclear option” if
you think that the enemy might launch atomic weaponry back at you. At
present, however the Democrats’ deterrent capacity is at its lowest in
memory and the more reactionary, religious, and militaristic of the two
dominant business parties is salivating to move fully beyond containment and
to engage full rollback of the other party by abolishing the filibuster
(last bastion of Congressional minority opposition) and radically realigning
the federal judiciary for decades.

The left should take a
“no nukes” posture on this latest reactionary gambit, of course. The current
Republican judicial appointments are terrible, far out of touch with actual
“mainstream” opinion in the US. The Senate “minority” is closer to the
actual American majority (thanks to the Constitution’s “two senators for
every state, no matter how small” rule, the Senate Democratic “minority”
actually represents a literal headcount majority as well as an opinion
majority on judicial appointments), we can rightly observe. We should remind
Republicans that they could in fact be a minority in the Senate
again…someday.

We should continue to
work for critical democratic transformation in the candidate selection and
policy processes and the national communications regime. Such changes
include public financing of campaigns, proportional representation, and
Instant Runoff in presidential elections, and the break-up of the insidious
corporate media monopoly. They would help bring America’s party and policy
systems and the nation’s visible opinion and commentary into proper
alignment with popular sentiment on vital matters of issues of domestic and
global policy.

At the same time,
remembering that it takes two parties to make the US into a one-party state,
we must challenge the Democrats to either pull themselves out of their
imperial corporatist lethargy or get out of the way to make room for others
who will take up the peoples’ fight against the arrogant masters of the
in-power right.

Paul Street is
the author of Empire and Inequality:
America and the World Since 9/11
(Boulder,
CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2004) and
Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, Policy, and the State of Black Chicago
(Chicago, IL, April 2005). He can be
reached at: pstreet99@sbcglobal.net.